The StreamBase Event Processing Blog

Lab49 Review of StreamBase

It's always good to get customer and partner feedback about our software, and so I'd like to share some recently posted publicly by a partner working in the financial services space. They recently completed our standard two-day training course.   

Here are excerpts from Sal Mangano's First Impressions:

"The first thing that stands out about Streambase is its support for two approaches to application development. The first is a graphical approach where you build an application by constructing a graph of icons representing input streams, operations, tables, output streams and the like. The second approach is textual using a SQL like language (StreamSQL) with many extensions relevant to streaming applications."

"The most compelling aspect of the graphical environment is that it greatly decreases the learning curve for individuals who have little experience with CEP. The graphical environment lets you concentrate on the concepts in a intuitive fashion without having to deal with the minutia of the syntax. It also helps that a streaming application maps well onto a directed graph. However, after mastering the product, I am fairly sure I would prefer the textual approach because an experienced developer will always be more productive in a text editor. This is especially true in the case of Streambase because its SQL like language is very compact and expressive (several nodes and arcs in the graphical view often collapse to a single StreamSQL statement)."

"Streambase is a highly extensible framework and you can create custom operations and adapters in Java and use them from within Streambase studio as if they were native components."

"Another very impressive feature of Streambase is its Feed Simulation tool. This tool provides a rich language for describing input data in a statistical fashion so that tuples can be randomly generated to help test your app. Data can also be manually entered, fed from files or databases or obtained directly from middleware or commercial feeds (like Reuters) via adapters available from Streambase."

"To sum up, my initial impressions are very positive. I’ll have a lot more definitive opinions after a try out something complex."

To read the entire assessment, please visit Lab49's blog.

Stream Processing Going Mainstream

If you have been wondering about the timing of Complex Event Processing (CEP) going mainstream you might want to take note of recent industry activity. Interest in CEP and adoption of the technology is moving forward everywhere you turn. It may not be long before you need a CEP engine for real-time tracking of CEP-related conferences, seminars, workshops and trade shows ;-)

Here’s a sampling of recent ones:

Aite Group sponsored a Roundtable May 9 entitled: “Event Processing: An In-Depth Look at the Practical Application of EP in the Capital Markets.”  Representatives from StreamBase, Aleri, Progress/Apama, and Vhayu discussed Complex Event Processing's benefits not only in algorithmic and strategy trading, and equities, but in new applications as well.

A-Team Group, a research, publishing and consulting company specializing in the field of information technology in financial markets, has just published a new report, sponsored by Intel, “Faster Than a Speeding Bullet -- Low Latency Architectures and Building Blocks For Tomorrow's Trading Applications.” It’s a guide to assist financial markets technologists in deploying low latency architectures.

A one-day conference/exhibit: “Event Processing in the Capital Markets Industry” will be held June 14, at Bayard, NY. Representatives of the major CEP vendors and CEP end-users will present, including: StreamBase Co-Founder and Vice President John Partridge, and Danny Moore, Chief Operating Officer of Wombat Financial Software Inc. They will lead a session: What Are the Requirements for Implementing an Event Processing Framework in a Financial Services Enterprise?

Gartner is sponsoring the first commercial, end-user conference on Event Processing Sept. 19-21 in Orlando, FL. The Gartner Event Processing Summit will cover: Business Activity Monitoring, Complex Event Processing, and Event Management.

CEP has taken root.  In StreamBase we know that because the phones are ringing.  As above, the external evidence is now increasingly pervasive.